History makers: where are the founders of the modern gay rights movement, and what is being done to preserve their stories? (Pioneers).

People keep telling Frank Kameny that he ought to write a book--a best-selling bombshell of an autobiography. A sort of The Oldest Living Gay Activist Tells All.

And the 77-year-old agrees that he probably should write his memoirs. For one thing, as a man who has devoted his life to the unprofitable profession of gay rights activist, Kameny says he could use the money. Then, of course, he also admits he's got a lot to say.

"It's a matter of getting around to it," says Kameny, who's lived in Washington, D.C., for the past 40 years and still makes rabble-rousing speeches for groups such as the Servicemembers Legal Defense Fund. "I used to be very efficient, and now it's all I can do to keep up and keep current with things."

It took the death of one of the fore-fathers of the gay rights movement, Harry Hay, in October to remind some gay men and lesbians of the many early activists like Kameny who are still very much alive and still have a lot to say. And these activists aren't only talking about the movement's early days; they're also showing how their experience--and gay history in general--can help gay rights in the days to come.

If Hay, who founded the Mattachine Society in 1950, "gets the credit for throwing the [gay rights] switch from off to on," as Kameny puts it, then Kameny gets a lot of the credit for keeping the movement juiced.

A Harvard-trained astronomer, Kameny lost his job with the U.S. Army Map Service in 1957 after his arrest on a morals charge based on his sexual orientation. He fought the dismissal, taking a landmark discrimination suit against the federal government all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear his case in 1961. In that decade he founded the D.C. chapter of the Mattachine Society, picketed the White House, the State Department, and the Civil Service Commission, and waged a campaign to repeal sodomy statutes across the country. In 1971 he ran for Congress, placing fourth in a six-person race.

"When I got into the movement, everything needed to be done," Kameny says. "I think those of us in the early years started with substantially nothing--politically, socially, and culturally--and we created an enormously successful movement that led to change in ways that nobody would have anticipated in our wildest dreams in the `50s and `60s."

It was pioneers like Kameny, the Reverend Troy Perry, Barbara Gittings, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon, who during the not-so-gay-friendly mid 20th century established what we now know as the fundamental principals for the gay rights movement: that homosexuality is normal and that gay men and lesbians have inherent rights.

Perry, 62, a former Pentecostal minister who in 1968 founded the first Metropolitan Community Church, continues to serve as moderator of the MCC, which now has more than 40,000 members in more than 300 congregations in 17 countries.

Partners Martin and Lyon, the San Francisco couple who in 1955 founded the mother of all lesbian organizations in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis, dedicate much of their time to issues about aging in the community.

"It's now on the [gay rights] agenda," Martin, 81 says.

"But it's taken a long time to get it there," Lyon, 78, adds. She and Martin, together almost 50 years, tend to complete each other's thoughts.

Gittings, 70, of Wilmington, Del., founded a New York Daughters of Bilitis chapter and, like Kameny, marched in picket lines at the White House and the Pentagon in the mid 1960s. She says for 44 years she's "had the satisfaction of working with other gay people ... to get the bigots off our backs, to oil the closet door hinges, to change prejudiced hearts and minds." When she got involved in the movement in 1958, she says, "There were scarcely 200 of us [activists] in the whole United States. It was like a club--we all knew each other."

But as Hay's death reminded us, many of the elder statesmen and stateswomen from the formative years before Stonewall are gone.

Martin mentions a name. "No, she's gone," Lyon says. Lyon mentions a name and then says, "But she's also dead." Kameny does the same, recalling the names of deceased colleagues from 30 to 40 years past. Many, he says, were forgotten before they passed on.

"We forget our pioneers, a lot of them," Perry says. "I can't blame people for that. There's a reason for it. In African-American families, children learn their history. In Native American families there's the same thing. But in the gay community, every young person who comes out of the closet has to look hard for our history in order to learn it." But where can one look for this history?

The attic in Kameny's two-story brick home in Washington's Palisades neighborhood is packed with artifacts of early gay rights rallies--papers and photographs and movement memorabilia, including the picket signs from mid-1960s protests. "I'm a pack rat," Kameny says. "I never throw anything away."

He recognizes, however, that he needs to draft a will and designate someone to care for his collection. "This notion of a gay community with a history is a fairly new thing," he says.

Before Stonewall there were very few depositories for gay history. Today, universities and public libraries archive gay materials--most notably the New York and San Francisco public libraries, Cornell University, and the One Institute and Archives, located at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. There are also community-based archives in Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and New York City, including a lesbian archives in Brooklyn. In addition, organizations such as the MCC keep historical records--photographs, newspaper clippings, drafts of lawsuits, mission statements, and correspondence.

"We wouldn't survive without our many gay-run archives," says Gittings, who for 15 years headed the American Library Association's gay task force and edited its gay bibliography. "They began collecting our materials when there wasn't much to preserve and no one outside our community was interested. They still operate on love and dedication. Admirable."

The National Center Archive at New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center is one of the largest collections, taking up about 1,000 square feet, according to Rich Wandel, the volunteer who founded the archives in 1990.

"Some of our best records are diaries," Wandel says. "Some are simple snapshots of a private party. We have records from organizations. We have papers from people. We have a vast collection of periodicals. They come from everywhere. Sometimes we find them. Sometimes they just show up at the door."

Stored away in these community archives are photographs and papers documenting the transformation of a people who--in the two decades between the formation of Mattachine and the riots at the Stonewall Inn--went from believing there was something terribly wrong with them to believing there was something terribly wrong with society to believing "gay is good."

"Gay is good"--Kameny says he came up with the slogan in 1968 after watching a news report on a demonstration in Maryland, at which the late civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael led protesters in chanting, "Black is beautiful." Kameny saw a parallel and, with his fondness for alliteration, came up with "Gay is good." A few months later at a meeting in Chicago, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations adopted the slogan.

"That's the fundamental point that has to be made," Kameny says. "The whole argument from the Right is that `gay is bad.' So as an activist with a number of accomplishments, when people ask me what the one thing I want to be remembered for, I say it's coining the slogan `Gay is good.'"

Perhaps, Kameny adds, he'll think more seriously about writing that book.

Neff is managing editor of the Chicago Free Press.